Participants in the Baltimore Longitudinal Study of Aging aged 60 and older were examined to detect changes in psychological, neurological, and neuropsychological tests related to early signs of Alzheimer's disease. It was hypothesized that impairments in recognition memory after multiple exposures would be sensitive to cognitive impairment that is not characteristic of normal aging. This hypothesis was tested by examining the relationships between recognition memory performance on the Grober-Buschke Cued Selective Reminding procedure and two measures of cognitive status, the Blessed Information-Memory-Concentration Test (BIMC) and the Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE). Subjects for these analyses were 169 participants who were administered the Army Alpha IQ and verbal fluency tests an average of 23 years prior to the MMSE and BIMC tests. The results showed that recognition memory accounted for 47% and 48% of the variation in the concurrent MMSE and BIMC. Recognition memory also accounted for 33% and 34% of the variation in MMSE and BIMC after removing 24% and 21% of the variation due to the age, education, gender, vocabulary, IQ and fluency tests. These results suggest that deficits in recognition memory performance are independent indicators of mental status, and may provide an age invariant means for detecting cognitive declines.